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GERMANISM 

AND THE 

AMERICAN CRUSADE 



BY 

GEORGE D. HERRON 

AUTHOR OF 

THE MENACE OF PEACE 

AND 

WOODROW WILSON AND THE WORLD'S PEACE 




NEW YORK 

MITCHELL KENNERLEY 

1918 



COPYRIGHT I918 BY 
MITCHELL KENNERLEY 



^% 



/IPff 23 I3i8 



PRrNTED IN AMERICA 

©CU497028 



GERMANISM 
AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 



EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 

An address I gave to the theological stu- 
dents of Geneva. It seemed to make much 
impression here, and I have thought the inter- 
pretation of America which I have made might 
he of use in America itself. It was given eoo- 
temporCy and then afterward written out from 
stenographic notes. I have kept the spoken 
form. 

• «•••• 

I wish you could devise a way of getting it 
broadcast into the training camps, 

• ••••• 

Europe — the world — huma/n destiny for a 
long time — hangs in the balance. It is a ter- 
rible moment. Everything depends upon 
America, and there is no time to be lost. 



GERMANISM AND THE 
AMERICAN CRUSADE 



T WOULD be stupid indeed, and false to 
-*■ my faith in the cause of the Allies as well, 
were I either to deny or to ignore that this 
cause has never been so imperilled, nor the 
condition of Europe so precarious, as at the 
present moment. Russia, for whom France 
sacrificed so much, no longer numbers herself 
among the Allies. Her empire shattered, her 
momentai^y government in the hands of a Ger- 
man Socialism, Russia is now, for all prac- 
tical purposes, co-working with Germany 
against the liberties of the world. With the 
release of the German and Austrian armies on 
the Russian front, and of the prisoners in Rus- 
sia's hands, the Central Empires will have 



4 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

more than a million fresh soldiers to throw 
against Italy and France. 

And the Allies have had to come to the de- 
fence of Italy: the barbarians are within her 
borders, (ierman aerial wings, laden with 
maddest murder and destruction, will soon be 
dropping their burdens upon the babies and 
basilicas of Venice and Verona and Padua — 
upon the Padua wherein we Americans walk 
always softly, and with penitent hearts. And 
who knows what farther cities — cities sacred 
to the progress of Christ and of civilization — 
will also be rendered desolate, their children 
buried beneath demolished schools, their an- 
cient arts and altars reduced to dust and 
ashes? 

The Germans are in Italy, too, not because 
of their military superiority, but because of 
their comprehensive and pervasive propa- 
ganda among the Italian people — a propa- 
ganda supported by the intrigue and treach- 
ery of forces working for Italian disunion and 
denationalization. The mountain gates that 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 5 

admitted the invaders to Italy were opened, 
alas! by traitor hands. And who can better 
sympathize with the Italian people than those 
of us who are proud of an American heritage 
and citizenship? We remember that we had 
our own Benedict Arnold in the darkest days 
of our War for Independence, and that Abra- 
ham Lincoln fought with treason, both covert 
and open, from the beginning to the end of 
our domestic struggle for national self-preser- 
vation. 

It is true that the result has been the oppo- 
site of what Germany planned. The real 
Italy is now awake: the national soul of this 
people, to whom civilization owes so much, has 
once more asserted itself. It is as if Mazzini 
and Cavour and Garibaldi had returned from 
the dead. Against overwhelming odds, and 
with well-nigh miraculous endurance, with 
heroism that is epic and amazing, the Italian 
armies are holding back the invader until the 
Allies can come to their succor in adequate 
numbers. 



6 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

But here is the crux of the present situation. 
France and England have despatched to Italy 
an army that was needed for their well-planned 
offensive on the Western front. In compel- 
ling the abandonment of that offensive, Ger- 
many has won a swift and ominous strategic 
advantage, while at the same time striking the 
Italian armies at the moment which seemed to 
promise Italy's obliteration as a fighting force, 
and her possible reduction to the political con- 
dition of Russia. 

And there are other advantages, diplomatic 
and economic, which Germany may now claim. 
The resources of Russia are hers : she has only 
to take them when she wills. Austro-Hun- 
gary and Turkey are her vassals, and Bulgaria 
also. Servia and Roumania are beneath her 
feet. The submarine menace is not less: it 
may be greater. America will meet the men- 
ace to-morrow, but to-day the murder which 
Germany has marshalled upon the high seas 
increases apace. 



II 

nUT there is another and darker advan- 
-D tage which Germany holds, and it is an 
advantage more menudng to our essential hu- 
manity than all the might of her malific arms. 
Germany is to-day deliberately and system- 
atically undermining the moral foundations 
of the world, in order to destroy its resisting 
power and subdue it unto herself. Nor to- 
day only: she had plotted this moral pillage of 
neighbor-nations before the war began— as a 
preparation for the war indeed. And so suc- 
cessfully is she now pressing forward her un- 
clean propaganda, her occult campaigns of se- 
duction and terrorimtion and coercion, that 
Ludendorf has publicly boasted of the con- 
quering results. 

It is but another and viler war in which Ger- 
many is thus engaged— a psychic war in fact, 

7 



8 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

and a war mayhap pregnant with universal de- 
lusion and disaster ; with the reduction of man- 
kind, for a time, to a woful condition of spir- 
itual squalor. It is a war whose weapons are 
indeed fashioned in hell — a war to remove 
truth and honor, fidelity and good faith, from 
political society and the intercourse of nations. 
It is a war so completely organized, so sinis- 
ter and bestial, so subterranean and sulphur- 
ous, that its vast and varied enormities are be- 
yond the power of non-German men and na- 
tions to accredit or imagine. So starkly mon- 
strous its will and its ways are, so corrupting 
to whoever or whatever becomes the object of 
its advances, that the world simply will not 
believe the thing exists. There is no parallel 
or antecedent for it: there has never been, so 
far as history knows or reveals, a national 
mind or method with which the German pene- 
tration can be compared. Other imperialisms, 
such as Rome and England, have betimes used 
bribery and corruption in order to hold sub- 
ject peoples. But with these prior imperial- 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 9 

isms, along with their despotisms and debauch- 
eries of vassal rulers, went also an element of 
moral dignity, a degree of moral addition and 
development, and sometimes a profound re- 
generation and ennoblement of the conquered 
tribe or nation. There has been nothing in 
former imperialist procedure that even ap- 
proached the spiritual debasement, the polit- 
ical ruin, that inevitably comes to each people 
that admits the German to its midst. Julius 
Csesar's descriptions of German methods, fifty 
years before the birth of Christ, are as if they 
were written to-day. He reports the Germans 
as "that treacherous race which is bred up 
from the cradle to war and rapine." He 
speaks bitterly of the Germans who "practise 
the base deception which first asks for peace 
and then openly begins war," and declares the 
Germans to be "outside the pale of negotia- 
tions." 

It is upon this darker war, this abominable 
psychic penetration — ^which she is now extend- 
ing and intensifying by methods inconceivable 



10 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

to any but her own mentality — it is upon this 
that Germany now stakes her ultimate hopes; 
upon this, rather than upon her armies, Ger- 
many depends for the ultimate envelopment 
and subjection of the world. She pursues this 
penetration by sinuous economic acquisition, 
and by gaining surreptitious control of the 
sources of credit. She pursues it by conse- 
crating scientific initiative and chemical inven- 
tion to a despicable espionage. She pursues 
it through the inner direction of religious and 
fraternal societies, and through sottish betray- 
als of hospitality. She pursues it by sending 
abroad her teachers, her doctors, her clerks, 
her domestic servants, each of them a spy or a 
missionary of Germanism. She pursues it by 
having her bribed servants in all the world's 
postal services; by having her diplomatic 
courtesans in the world's political centres. 
She pursues it by an almost universal black- 
mail: there is scarcely an important household 
in France or England, scarcely a governmen- 
tal department or agency, of whose secrets the 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 11 

Germans are unaware. The evil eyes of Ger- 
many run to and fro through all the earth, 
and nothing escapes her pernicious and par- 
alyzing observation and invasion. Not for 
one moment, neither in victory nor in defeat, 
does she relax her determination to impart the 
German way and will, the German state of 
mind, to every living people. 



Ill 

WE are at war, we of the Allies, with 
more than a military empire: we are 
at war, as Saint Paul would say, with the 
principalities of darkness, with the evil powers 
of the air: we are at war with a diabolic re- 
ligion. 

Make no mistake about it: Germanism is as 
certainly and distinctly a religion as primitive 
Buddhism, apostolic Christianity, or early 
Mohammedanism was a religion — but a re- 
ligion as black as these were white. Essential 
evil has been taken by the German national 
soul to be its good, to be its god. The jungle- 
inheritance which man has so long and yet un- 
successfully sought to transmute or discard, 
the persisting primeval mind that oppresses 
and rots the nations — it is these that Germany 
prays as well as fights to preserve, and the 

12 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 13 

marauding might that issues from these is her 
chosen summum bonum. 

Germanism is the worship and practice of 
material might as the Supreme Power, the re- 
gard for material efficiency as the Supreme 
Good. This is the only faith which the Ger- 
man tribes have ever consistently held, ever 
truly concentrated upon. It is the core of 
their creeds, the centre and circumference of 
their philosophies. Their mysticisms, in the 
last analysis, are the hallowings of sheer power 
— a pillar of cloud about materialist altars. 
Even Luther's appeal and stay were Jehovis- 
tic might. So assertive and formative this 
faith has been, especially since the time of Bis- 
marck and Marx, that the German collectiv- 
ity has created an actual psychic entity, a sort 
of national super-mind, that, enthroned and 
dominant, answers to all the purposes of a 
fearful and effectual deity. 

Yes, the Germans have literally made for 
themselves a god after their own image, and 
have delivered themselves bound into Ms 



14 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

hands. They are so mastered and maddened, 
so blinded and besotted, by the monstrous 
thing they have made, they have so passed into 
the service of this world-abomination, that it 
may be there is left to them no power whereby 
they may deliver themselves. 



IV 



npHE winter will decide; for it offers Ger- 
^ many the chance to deliver herself from 
the god she has created; and if she does not 
now see and seize the chance, then her deliv- 
erance must come from without. 

She must not count upon her present mili- 
tary advantage. Not because of that advan- 
tage will the Allies lay down their arms; nor 
will America sheathe the sword she has drawn 
— not if perchance all Europe be beneath the 
German dominion for a time. 

The advantage which Germany's military 
ascendency now gives her is this: — belikely 
her last opportunity to redeem herself in the 
eyes of the world, and to avert her own ulti- 
mate destruction. She can now, without de- 
feat or humiliation to herself, propose terms 
of peace that shall make way for the society 

15 



16 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

of nations, thus revealing whether or no there 
be a moral remnant among her leaders, a sav- 
ing repentance amongst her tribes. She can 
say to the world that the war has lasted long; 
that millions are dead, and the battles have 
brought no decision; and that now civilization 
is on the brink of the precipice. She can fur- 
thermore say that, in view of the price that has 
already been paid, and in order to avert the 
further crucifixion of humanity, she will her- 
self propose precise and persuasive terms of 
peace. Let her proclaim the complete and un- 
conditional restoration of Belgium and the oc- 
cupied portions of France. Let her return 
Alsace-Lorraine to France, and the possession 
of every part of Poland and of Russia. Let 
her request that Austria take a like attitude 
towards the Serbs and the Italians. Let her 
propose, in fine, the instant and honest re- 
making of the map of Europe according to the 
respective wishes of the European peoples, 
and the submission of all international ques- 
tions to the conference for peace, or to the 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 17 

tribunal which the resultant society of nations 
may erect. Were Germany wise and able 
now to take this great initiative, to make the 
supreme beau geste, she would do for herself 
in a day what the battles of a hundred years 
could not accomplish. She would change her 
present position of a hated outlaw among the 
nations to one of fraternity and healing help- 
fulness. 

And if the heau geste is beyond her mind 
or imagination, if she is altogether incapable 
of accepting the divine chance, it is not prob- 
able she will ever again be consulted as to the 
terms of the peace that shall finally be made. 
If she fails to enter the door now open, it will 
not open again: it will close down upon her 
and her present political existence forever. 
She will not again be permitted to discuss or 
to choose: she can thenceforth have only such 
terms as shall be imposed upon her by the hu- 
manity that has suffered such immeasurable 
debasement and misery at her hands. She will 
be placed in such bonds, or be so divided, as 



18 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

to make it impossible that she ever again have 
power to inflict what she has inflicted upon the 
world these last four years — indeed, these last 
forty years — yea, these twenty centuries and 
more. Whether the decision comes in two 
years or twenty, and even if she yet have Eu- 
rope awhile beneath her feet, the sword which 
America has drawn will not be sheathed until 
Germanism is destroyed from the face of the 
earth. 



y 



EUROPE is only beginning to understand 
America, and that very dimly. Permit 
me, as a middle-west American, to venture 
upon an interpretation. 

We Americans are still essentially a pioneer 
race. Our composite population is made up 
of peoples who mostly left Europe for some 
sort of freedom, religious, political, economic. 
We are not yet far removed from our pioneer 
past. The ancestral impulse is still ours. 
However contradictory and unrealizable may 
have been some of our ideals and efforts, we 
have not yet given over our original quest of 
The Golden Society. We are still political 
and religious pioneers. Our fabulous indus- 
trial development has not submerged The 
Great Hope which set the feet of our fathers 

19 



20 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

upon the coasts and amidst the forests and the 
prairies of the new world. 

We are also the most sentimental, the most 
idealistic, of the nations; and this despite our 
high finance, our industrial despotisms, our po- 
litical corruptions. Even our money-making 
has been of the nature of a sport, and has had 
in it a certain idealistic element. Those of us 
who have been the severest critics of American 
capitalism have yet recognized that it did not 
represent essential Americanism. 

Mere wealth has not been an end in itself 
with the American money-maker : we have not 
made money for its own sake. Our pursuit of 
wealth has always been a game to be played, 
a rivalry to be entered into, with some sort of 
ideal for its goal. And once he is stirred and 
seized by some strong universal responsibility, 
the American pursuit of the gold that perish- 
eth can easily be converted into the pursuit of 
the gold that is hid in the heart of God, and 
that must therein be gathered for immediate 
mortal uses. The best evidence of this is the 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 21 

fact that we have entered upon this stupen- 
dous war, not knowing to what ends it may 
compel us, yet knowing it to be in square con- 
flict with our material interests, mayhap con- 
suming the wealth we have been a hundred 
years upheaping. 

Again, the substratum of our national life 
is unconsciously yet profoundly permeated by 
a curious blend of two great influences coming 
out of Geneva. Our primal national spirit is 
a mingling of Calvin and Rousseau. Rous- 
seau is the spuntual author of the Declaration 
of Independence which Jefferson penned; and 
those recurring religious movements which 
sweep over American life, so quickly and vari- 
ously affecting it, are Calvinistic in their gen- 
esis—even movements which take on theoreti- 
cal expressions contradictory to Calvinism, 
such as Christian Science, or the earlier 
churches that had the Wesleys for their found- 
ers. The Genevan blend is also in our teach- 
ers and leaders: you may find both Calvin and 
Rousseau in the souls of Abraham Lincoln and 



22 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

Woodrow Wilson. In one fashion or an- 
other, articulate or inarticulate, the idea of the 
visible kingdom of God on earth, coexistent 
with and including the natural right of each 
individual to his own free life and develop- 
ment, has always been potential in American 
expectation and purpose. The theocratic and 
democratic principles, inextricably bound up 
with each other, are always somewhere in the 
American midst, even in the deepest shadows 
of our financial and political corruption. 

And behind this politico-theological inherit- 
ance, and deeper than all else, is an inerad- 
icable suspicion that the Sermon on the Mount 
is practicable; that Christ is the actual Lord 
of the earth. Incredible as it seems, and how- 
ever unintelligent and unorganized, this belief 
in Christ is no less the living foundation of 
American society. And our Gargantuan for- 
tunes, our fabulous industrial development, the 
wealth we have heaped up beyond all count- 
ing, — these have never been able to abolish or 
overbear a persistent though reticent faith that 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 23 

the practice of Christ would yet prevail in our 
politics and wealth-making, and prove itself 
the solution of our mortal problems. This 
faith has been rarely confessed; and it has al- 
ways floundered in the face of social facts and 
forces. But it was always there, concealed in 
even our boisterous commercialism, and it only 
needed a supreme crisis to first precipitate it, 
and then to have it effectuate itself in a renas- 
cence of apostolic Christian purpose. 

It is this that Europe does not understand, 
neither Germany nor the Allies. If Germany 
understood, she would seek an unconditional 
peace to-morrow. If the Allies fully under- 
stood, there would be no question of a nego- 
tiated peace. 

It is incredible that, for the first time in the 
earth's annals, a great and powerful people 
has gone to war for humanity, for an abstract 
ideal, and against its own material interests. 
But, unbelievable as it is, it is true: America 
has gone to war for the purpose of cleaning 
up the world, and of ridding it of war and 
Germanism forever. 



VI 

GERMANY has deceived herself as to the 
quality of our common American 
pacifism. The reluctance of America to en- 
ter the war, or to believe that it could long con- 
tinue, was interpreted as indicative of a non- 
militant national soul. It is true that, for a 
long time, the encircling catastrophe did seem 
to us impossible. We felt that it must be some 
vast and horrible delirium, some devil's dream, 
from which we should awaken. It was against 
a half -century of American expectation. We 
had come to really believe that, in spite of our 
political and industrial sins, in spite of the 
world's materialism, we were approaching the 
threshold of international arbitration and fed- 
eration, opening into an ultimate good- will be- 
tween nations and societies and individuals. 
It took us two years to get it into our heads 

24 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 25 

that such a thing as the present world-war 
could actually be, or that the deeds which the 
German soldiers did were real. Slowly, in- 
deed, did the thing become credible; slowly did 
its meaning penetrate the American mind. 

But when we did perceive the catastrophe 
and the crisis it had precipitated, when we be- 
gan to lay hold of the meaning of it all, we 
were then moved by a sense of responsibility 
that was new and strange in the conscience and 
the conduct of nations. There grew within 
us a quiet but no less relentless resolution to 
hunt out and destroy the political system con- 
secrated to the preparations and mobilizations 
of the hell which the Germans had loosed upon 
the earth. We determined to make it impos- 
sible that the like of this should ever again 
happen to mankind. We began to feel, very 
soon, that unto us was amazingly given the di- 
vine chance of closing up the old world and 
its political methods; and that it furthermore 
rested with us to lay living foundations for a 
world wherein should be none but democratic 



26 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

and cooperative peoples. We began to see 
in the pan- German idea and assault the con- 
centration and citadel of all the wrong forces 
of history, thus-gathered for their final strug- 
gle with the forces that make for the free and 
federate humanity. 

Now if Europe had looked deeply enough, 
or the German diplomats who had been in 
America had had any eyes of understanding, 
it would have been seen that American non- 
militarism is not non-militantism. We had 
ceased to be a military people, it is true We 
had become pacifist in the sense that we be- 
lieved the military method of settling disputes 
belonged to an unreturning and barbarous 
past. We had come to look upon war as an- 
achronistic, as having no place in a decent or 
advancing civilization. But because we were in 
this sense non-militarist, it was a fatal mis- 
take, on the part of Germany, not to discern 
that we Americans are the most militant of 
the nations. 

But such we were, — such we are, — as our 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 27 

present procedure proves. We had merely 
transferred our militancy from the savagery of 
war to spiritual and social inquiry and adven- 
ture. American youths were preparing to 
make war on the unknown ; to wring from na- 
ture her secrets ; to find out the truth about the 
kingdom of heaven; to make the world a free 
and decent habitation, an equal invocation and 
opportunity, a place of brave and abundant 
and beauteous life, for all the sons and daugh- 
ters of men. 

It was Germany that blindly summoned this 
American militancy to action: she gave the 
fundamental American motive a grim but glo- 
rious opportunity. In playing for herself the 
devil's game, she has unknowingly called into 
the arena a nation that will now play one of 
God's great games, and play it consciously 
and constantly till it is wouo And the provi- 
dential nature of our summons and response 
is well-attested by a leadership that appears 
but rarely amidst the centuries, and then in 
times of great crisis. I refer, of course, to 



28 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

President Woodrow Wilson, whose deepening 
faith and unshakable resolution we follow. 

America now sees here in central Europe, 
coming out of the German lands, an ancient 
spiritual monstrosity, a surviving primeval 
enormity, ever and anon breaking forth, when- 
ever it reckons its might sufficient, to steal or 
destroy the fruits of man's efforts toward a 
spiritual civilization — toward a society that 
shall be entirely civil and really free. For two 
thousand years, out of these German forests 
and fogs, Europe's destroyers have come. 
How many times has not Italy been laid waste 
by the Germans and been brought under their 
despotism? What European nation, large or 
small, has not had to fight for its life against 
the Germans or their dynasts? What effort 
toward upward change, including her own 
Protestant Reformation, has not been visited 
with Germany's sword and savagery? Except 
for the brief time when Napoleon drove the 
beast to its lair, the German terror has been 
always upon Europe. 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 29^ 

And now America has determined, not 
merely to drive this terror to its lair, but to 
destroy it utterly. America is convinced that 
there can be no society of nations, that the 
peace of good-will can never prevail, that 
there can be no continually-ascending social 
evolution, until this evil thing is felled and fin- 
ished. America sees that Germanism, how- 
ever difficult it may be to define, is the enemy 
of mankind ; the enemy of a common spiritual 
promise; the enemy of international morality; 
the enemy of social fraternity. Fraternity 
can have no chance, neither democracy nor 
freedom, nor the whole thing that Christ 
meant, until this reeking dragon of German- 
ism is slain. And we Americans are resolved, 
God helping us, not to sheathe the sword until 
we slay it. 

YeSj Germanism has to he brought to an 
end; the thing has to be accomplished; Amer- 
ica has gone forth for this accomplishment, 
Germanism and Americanism cannot stay to- 
gether in the same world: be it to-day or a him- 



30 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

dred years hence, one or the other must go. 
The iron of God has gone deeply into the 
American soul, and in the strength thereof has 
America gone forth, and gone forth never to 
retreat. With the thing that Germany now is 
and means we shall not negotiate, we shall not 
compromise. Either she utterly and at once 
repents, becoming hence the complete oppo- 
site of what she now is, or America will march 
forth for Germany's military and imperial de- 
struction. 

And we intend not only to destroy German- 
ism, nor only to make the world safe for de- 
mocracy: we intend to make way for every- 
thing that makes hopeful the inner struggle of 
mankind upward. You have only to look into 
the faces of the splendid young thousands now 
gathering in France, — divinely awful with a 
youth the like of which this world has never 
before beheld, — whole regiments made up of 
men from our higher schools and universities, 
— ^men who are not herded and docile human 
animals but resolved and radiant individuals. 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 31 

— you have but to look in the faces of these, 
and you may read therein the soul of an Amer- 
ican nation become conscious of its world-mis- 
sion, aflame with righteous judgment, and with 
a creative purpose that sources in Christ. 

Germany must now understand, even our 
Allies need yet to understand, that the more 
deeply we are involved in the war, the more de- 
voted thereto shall we become, the more re- 
lentless though resplendent will be our resolu- 
tion. Even if Germany should yet win victo- 
ries that seem complete for a time; even if she 
fulfil her boast of defeating France and Eng- 
land before we can fight beside them in suffi- 
cient force; — even so, America will never make 
peace with a victorious Germany. 

Europe must understand that we are capa- 
ble of becoming a nation of high fanatics. 
Every day the war continues makes it more 
and more to the American mind a religious 
war, a holy war. We are entering upon a 
veritable crusade, with a sword consecrated 
not only on the altars of the world's revolu- 



32 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

tions, but upon the very altar of Christ's prom- 
ise of the kingdom of heaven. And ours will 
not be such as the crusade once derided by 
Ruskin, — "a crusade to rescue the tomb of a 
dead god," — ^but a crusade to make way for 
the coming of the living Christ into the total 
life of humanity. If you listen deeply 
enough, you may hear in the tramp of these 
millioned American youths the mystic march 
of the armies of Christ, fore-pictured by St. 
John in the Apocalypse. And if you watch 
closely the development of the American soul, 
as it ascends through these youthful hosts, you 
will find that in some rude yet glowing way 
these count the death they may or must die as 
the greatest opportunity that life could have 
given them; and they account it so because 
they are instinct with the idea that they are 
not only cleaning up the present evil world, 
but are also filling the whole human future 
with opportunity and promise such as man- 
kind has never before possessed. 



VII 

AMERICA and Germany stand over 
against each other as respective cham- 
pions of two opposing conceptions of man, 
two irreconcilable reasons for being. 

German history and evolution proceed upon 
the idea of the state as the supreme end of 
historic man, the final earthly expression of 
the will of God, and therefore super-moral 
and above law. In this conception, man is 
but an efficient instrument at best, and a serv- 
ile creature always, owned by the state and ex- 
isting for its expansion and dominion: as an 
individual, having a dignity and destiny of his 
own, he does not exist. Indeed, not in Ger- 
man thought, much less in German institu- 
tions, does either individuality or its candid 
recognition have place. The German state is 
the negation of individuality: it exists and ex- 

33 



34 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

pands, it conquers and compels, by virtue of 
its conscription of the individual's mental and 
moral being. 

Whether it be her evil penetration of other 
nations, or her close control of her own tribes 
and states, it is in this conscription of the soul 
that German power consists — a conscription 
subjecting the citizen to an automatism that is 
the very perfection of slavery. It is a slavery, 
too, that is all the more stultifying and besot- 
ting because of its concealment in an impos- 
ing precision and parade of organization. The 
German does not understand, the international 
apostles of German efficiency do not see, and 
least of all is it discerned by that masquerade 
of Germanism which terms itself Marxian and 
socialist, that the authoritarian order which 
they admire is built upon the soul's ordained 
but disguised degradation. 

In contradistinction to Germanism, Amer- 
ican ideals and institutions have their birth and 
being in a sincere faith in democracy, and are, 
despite betrayed hopes and baffling blunders, 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 35 

a stupendous attempt at democratic realiza- 
tion. To this democracy, and in the debates 
and events which have determined America's 
evolution as a nation, the right of each man to 
completely be, the affirmation of his worth in 
and to himself, is fundamental; and equally 
fundamental is the responsibility of political 
and social institutions for furnishing him the 
freedom and opportunity that make complete 
being possible. It is what he is in himself, it 
is the fullness and effectiveness of his individ- 
uality, that constitutes his political and social 
value; and society or the state have value to 
him according to the measure and the means 
these provide for the realization of his selfhood 
in the joyous service of his fellows. States 
and governments exist, according to Amer- 
ican or democratic theory, for no other purpose 
than the making of man, and are judged ac- 
cording to their success or failure in the ful- 
filment of this purpose. It was in this pur- 
pose the American Revolution was conceived, 
as were also the French and English Revolu- 



S6 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

tions; and it is in the fulfilment of this pur- 
pose that the American people have gone, 
however blindly and unworthily betimes, upon 
their political way. 



VIII 

NOR is the American or democratic con- 
ception of man other than the expres- 
sion, in political terms, of the idea of Christ. 
The early Christian idea, that which themed 
all that Christ and his apostles said and did, 
consisted in the revelation and assertion of the 
universal worth of the single soul — of society's 
responsibility to and for it, of its responsibil- 
ity to and for society. According to this idea, 
it is for the fulness of the individual, in ac- 
cordant association with other individuals, that 
the universe unfolds. It is with the complete 
creation of men in his own image that the God 
of Christ occupies himself. And the stars in 
their courses, the temples and their religions, 
the states and their governments, the fruits of 
the fields and the researches of the intellect, 

37 



38 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

have no other reason for being than the evoca- 
tion of each man's divine identity. 

Christ conceived of humanity as one living 
and eternal organism — an organism which 
cannot be made perfect except through the per- 
fecting of each of its members. Not until the 
downmost man is redeemed unto fulness of 
being, not until the last man has achieved a will 
that is one with the divine will, — not till then 
can the human totality become harmonious 
and unwasting and happy: and until then the 
human collectivity, the whole visible and invis- 
ible communion of man, is deranged and dis- 
cordant and imperilled. The rights and the 
responsibilities of the individual, therefore, 
and the orchestration and upward constancy 
of the collectivity, — these constitute one and 
the self-same problem — a problem whose solu- 
tion is identical with the truth and the tri- 
umph of the Christ. 

It is precisely the truth that is in Christ, it 
is his doctrine of man and the triumph 
thereof, that are predicated by the mobiliza- 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 39 

tion of Americanism against Germanism. It 
is his profounder coming that is being pre- 
pared, if we will have it so, by the American 
crusade for a democratic and federate world. 
The Great War is our summons and opportu- 
nity to invoke his universal and culminative 
appearingo Whether or no we shall soon see 
him as he is, whether or no we shall behold him 
as the very centre and uniting law of our hu- 
manity, depends upon how we conduct the war 
to its conclusion. If we discern not or deny 
the day of our visitation; if we dare not risk 
the heroic individual and institutional repent- 
ance which the light of him relentlessly re- 
quires; if we seek coward cover in the dark- 
ness of compromise, essaying peace where 
there is no peace; — if so the uplifted Son of 
Man be by us again cast down, then it must 
be left to a nobler generation to prepare his 
completer and completing presence in the 
world. 



IX 



BETWEEN the German conception of 
man as a creature of the herd, as a me- 
chanical and disciplined human tool of the 
state, and the American and apostolic concep- 
tion of man as a free son of God, there can be 
neither peace nor truce nor parley. Laden 
with predestinative consequences to all men 
and every nation, constituting the world's 
most definitive crisis, the conflict between 
these two life-conceptions is upon us. We can- 
not postpone or escape it: the issue will have 
to be fought out: one or the other conception 
must possess the world: if not to-day, then to- 
morrow the decision must be reached. And 
whatever it be, proceeding as it does from a 
struggle for the possession of our whole plane- 
tary life, it will determine, as I have said, our 
common direction and destiny for a long time 

40 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 41 

to come, and with an irrevocable finality. We 
shall be choosing between darkest human night 
and a new human day — between profound 
spiritual reaction and vast spiritual expansion 
— between the soul's long repression and its 
quick enlargement and ascension. 

Essentially and practically, the war which 
the German Empire is now carrying on is 
nothing else than a war against the human soul 
— against the right of the soul to self-deter- 
mination and self -ownership, to its own voli- 
tion, eocperience and development. The brag 
and the might of the German arms, the glam- 
our and the cheat of German material effi- 
ciency, the physical ease and relief from re- 
sponsibility which the German state and its 
systems provide, — these constitute the Great 
Seducer, the Great Destroyer, the Devouring 
Dragon of the Apocalypse; these are the su- 
preme assault of the powers of darkness upon 
the soul and upon society — ^upon the forces 
that would identify our human nature with the 
nature of God. 



42 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

Americanism, on the other hand, so far as 
its place and purpose in this war are con- 
cerned, is identical with essential Christianism 
— with the soul's round redemption and as- 
cendency. The idea which Christ first pro- 
jected among men — the idea of a human soci- 
ety so inclusive and considerate and consecra- 
tive that it can only be described as the king- 
dom of heaven — this idea is, after all, the 
perennial charter of our western world. And 
our American youths, no matter what their im- 
mediate mind about the matter, have gone 
forth as the actual soldiers of this divine idea. 
The sword they have drawn against German- 
ism — against Germanism with its evil fore- 
sight, against Germanism with its unimagin- 
able Satanic craft, against Germanism with its 
long-developed purpose to subdue the earth 
and conscript the soul — the sword which 
America has thus drawn is none other than the 
sword of the Son of God. 

The war may last long, and terrors yet in- 
conceivable come upon us and increase — may 



GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 43 

last till cherished institutions prove futile and 
fall away; may last until deep night enclose 
all peoples for awhile. But if Satan be let 
loose for a season, it is that we may discern 
and destroy him, so that his authority be upon 
states and societies no more. It is true that it 
is not given to us to know the times and the 
modes of his ending, nor through what trib- 
ulations we may pass ere we reach it. But 
this we may know and need not doubt, — if we 
are able to receive it, — that the kingdoms of 
this world are on the way to become the king- 
dom of our God and his Christ ; and that this, 
and nothing less than this, is the meaning of 
these terrible but marvellous days — a mean- 
ing, too, depending not upon the teachers for 
its revelation and report, but soon by the peo- 
ples to be perceived and proclaimed. 

The air is even now astir with news; al- 
ready, some strange new faith is unfolding. 
There is an unprecedented sense of Christ 
among us; and commanding dreams of his 
commonwealth are abroad, compelling many 



44 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 

secret but splendid consecrations. There are 
also those who, watching amidst the slaughter 
and the desperate shadows, are glimpsing his 
sudden peace, waiting there, with all its sur- 
passing ardency and strength, to spring upon 
the shattered nations. They see him gather- 
ing these, healed and resurgent, into one ful- 
filling fellowship, one ineffable freedom, and 
a common and eternal progress in the bosom 
of God. And it is by this faith, — it is by this 
faith, — it is upon the altar of some such stu- 
pendous expectation of Christ, — that not a 
few American fathers and mothers are offer- 
ing up their willing and beloved sons. 



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